Felix Werder at 90: a creative spark transformed

'Without the acknowledging of those few musicians who were
pursuing an idea of musical modernism, such as
Margaret Sutherland, Keith
Humble, and Felix
Werder, among others, Australia seems stuck in a state of
permanently starting out, of always beginning again, as each
new generation invents the wheel, largely unknowing of those
who had been building the culture before them', writes Warren
Burt. He has been involved in organising a special birthday
tribute concert for Felix Werder on
23 February (broadcast on ABC Classic FM on 25
February), as well as restoring Werder's 1974 electronic
work The Tempest.

[External links section updated 28 February 2012.]

Australia generally doesn't do a good job of looking after its
elderly citizens. For example, each time a pension increase is
talked about, it becomes a political football, each party trying
to outscore the other in tightness and meanness (they call it
'fiscal responsibility') while desperately trying not to appear
uncompassionate or ungrateful to those whose efforts built the
place over so many years. The hypocrisy of this annual charade is
galling at best, nauseating at worst.

In the arts, too, with the exception of a few superstars,
Australia seems to prefer that its elder statesmen and women just
quietly fade away. (Trot 'em out once a year for a ceremony and
two minutes on the ABC, then back to the warehouse with 'em!) The
arts in Australia, after all, are largely a young person's game.
In music, it's not enough that a person writes or improvises
music. They also have to organise events, write about them, sell
the tickets, sell the idea of the concert or series to the media,
record the event, and produce the recording for distribution.

Felix Werder in 1989.

This kind of entrepreneurial activity takes a lot of energy, and,
in many cases, the effort is directed towards promoting the work
of oneself and one's friends. The curatorial and media worlds in
Australia are largely devoted to discovering new talent, and
promoting the next 'big thing'. There are very few organisations
in Australia that regularly produce music by composers and
improvisers from all age groups, and from a wide range of styles
and/or 'scenes'. In this kind of style-oriented,
entrepreneur-driven environment, it's very easy for older artists
to slip from view.

But the creative spirit does not go away, even if the light of
publicity and participation fades. If the spirit of inquiry and
creativity is there, people keep investigating while they still
have breath. It's enough to cite the story of New Zealand
composer Douglas Lilburn who 'retired' from composition in the
early 1980s. Twenty years later, after his death in 2001, piles
of manuscripts were found - piano pieces that he'd been
'revising' during his 'post-composition' years. The itch doesn't
go away.

I remember, during the very much unlamented debates on
post-modernism of 20 years ago, Rainer Linz's quip: 'Australia
can't have post-modernism because it never had modernism'. The
thrust of that remark was an understanding of what an ahistorical
society Australia was. Without the acknowledging of those few
musicians who were pursuing an idea of musical modernism, such as
Margaret Sutherland, Keith
Humble, and Felix
Werder, among others, Australia seems stuck in a state of
permanently starting out, of always beginning again, as each new
generation invents the wheel, largely unknowing of those who had
been building the culture before them. (My educational colleagues
sometimes say, 'This generation has no knowledge of history!' I
point out to them that given the structure of the media and the
educational system, there is no way that 'that generation' - and
it doesn't matter which generation we're talking about - CAN have
a knowledge of history. To give them that knowledge is largely
OUR job.)

The building of culture can take place very subtly. I remember a
conversation with a colleague where we were speculating as to why
Melbourne had such a sense of cooperation in its new music scene.
He pointed out that the elders, such as Felix, Margaret, Keith
and others, had been very cooperative in organising events in the
1950s, and that although various scenes had come and gone, this
kind of cooperation was then built into the ethos of the
community here. This is the sort of subtle influence that can
have a long-reaching effect, such that even those who initiated
it can be largely unaware of the influence they had.

Felix Werder, weakened in body, but not in sprit, will be 90
years old on 24 February. For the past 10-15 years, he has
largely been absent from the new music 'scene'. Living in
Hawthorn with Vera, his rock of support and strength, the man who
was once such a strong and challenging presence in the music
world of Melbourne has been living, composing, and pursuing a
whole series of intellectual interests, largely in isolation. The
occasional European, or more rarely Australian, friend has asked
him for a piece, and he's been happy to oblige, but the old days
of organising concerts, touring, writing, battling musical
conservatism and polemicising are long in the past.

In their place have been a continuing exploration of many topics,
and a deepening of personal exploration and expression. On my
visits to Felix and Vera over the past decade, I've been amazed
at the range of areas he's been exploring, from the political
writings of Gore Vidal and Henry Thoreau to the classics of
Taoism, from continuing readings in the Kabala to the operas of
Rameau, his intellectual explorations continue unabated.

When the American composer Elliott Carter turned 100, people
remarked that his work seemed not to be innovating anymore.
Carter's pithy reply - that he had spent 70 years learning how to
write the music he wanted, and now he was getting on with writing
it, thank you very much - also seems apt in Felix's case. In his
work of the past 10 years, there has been a deepening and
refining of his technique. One of Felix's most famous quotes is
'To understand a work of art, we must first ask, Who paid for
it?' But more and more over the past decade, his work has
been getting closer to what one might term 'pure music', a
product of intense reflection and personal expression. The light
and elfin opening of Ill-tempered Clavier, one of the
featured works on the 23 February concert, is a far cry from the
expressionistic force of his Requiem of the 1970s, but
the creative spark is still the same, just transformed by years
of isolation and reflection.

During the past decade, Felix has also been teaching privately,
and his insistence that students know their history, and then go
beyond it into finding their own path has been a salutary
influence on those lucky few who have beaten a path to his door.
Unlike the popular media in Australia, Felix very well
understands Harry Partch's old saying: 'Affirmation of parentage
is a primary source of rebellion'.

On 23 February, at Iwaki Hall, three new works of Felix Werder's
will be premiered, along with a work from the '90s, and a classic
electronic work of his from the '70s, which hasn't been heard
publicly since its composing. Here's a look at the works that
will be performed.

The title of the work Quinny on the Roof (1992) for
percussion solo, refers to the Werders' cat in the 1990s, Quinny.
Quinny was named after the quinella. In the early '90s, Felix
(one of whose hobbies is an abiding interest in the TAB) won the
quinella. He used his winnings to fund a tour of his Australia
Felix ensemble to Europe. Quinny on the Roof was written
for Richard Pusz, the ensemble's percussionist, and its
fragmentation and sense of sonic fantasy is typical of Felix's
work at the time.

Ill-tempered Clavier (2009) and Dice (2010) are
two recent piano works. The first is a set of eight very short
pieces. Although separated from each other by double bar lines,
and of different characters, the piece seems to me to be one long
solo melody line. Written without dynamics or expression marks
(the pianist is to add those), the piece, at least to my ear,
resembles a long recitative. Dice is a piece which is
also made up of fragments, but here the fragments can be repeated
and rearranged at the pianist's will.

Felix recently said to James Hullick that he thought there were
two kinds of composers - mathematicians and gamblers - and that
he was definitely one of the latter. I remember Felix showing me
one of his pieces of the late '90s - he had taken a freely
composed texture, cut it up, and rearranged the fragments to form
the eventual finished work. Composition by chance and Xerox
machine, one might say. In Dice the cutting up happens
in real time, in collaboration with the pianist.

The H-Factor (2011) for string quartet is Felix's most
recent work, and he claims it will be his last (see my comments
about Douglas Lilburn, above.) 'H' stands for Felix's doctor,
Hymie. Hymie, says Felix, is keeping him alive. He survives
because of the 'H-Factor'. This is Felix's 19th string quartet.
The insights of a lifetime of writing for the medium are refined
here into a very intense and pure personal expression, as
textures build up, and new material emerges from those textures.

Giorgione's La tempesta (1505-1508 circa).

The Tempest (after Giorgione's painting La
tempesta) was written in 1974, using the Synthi 100, a very
large digital-sequencer controlled synthesiser, which was
installed in the studio at Melbourne University. The piece was
originally recorded on LP and released by Greg Young on Mopoke
Records. In 2005, when New York-based producer Al Margolis asked
me about releasing an album of Felix's electronic music (he
actually had the original LPs), we found that the master tapes
had been lost in the intervening years. However, the LPs still
existed. I put around 100 hours into recovering and cleaning up
the LP recordings. To a large extent, the clean-up was
successful, and the CD, on Pogus Records, continues to sell well
and gather favourable reviews.

Felix once told me that his work with electronics had changed the
way he thought about instrumental music. This was especially true
in his understanding of timbre. In The Tempest, a
28-minute long piece, this is shown very clearly. With the Synthi
100, Felix makes electronic timbres that instruments are
incapable of making - instruments have most of their energy in
the lower parts of their sound. Here Felix makes sounds where
most of the energy and activity is in the upper parts of the
sound, creating brilliant sounds with an edge, and an inner life.
These are then arranged in a very spacious manner, using
Giorgione's curious allegorical painting as a model for his sound
structure.

The Tempest can stand comparison with any of the other
analogue works of the time, whether in Australia or overseas.
Mostly abstract, although with occasional nods and winks to
'walking bass' lines (Felix was a jazz bass player in his youth),
the work revels in the implications and intrinsic possibilities
of the electronic medium. For various reasons, Felix was unable
to continue his work with electronics, but in this concert we
will get to hear this work in nearly ideal conditions, as Felix
wanted it to be heard originally, 38 years ago.

In the early 19th century, the Japanese monk Monchu, at the age
of 90, living in the famous Shisendo temple in Kyoto, wrote 'The
Ageless Pine at Shisendo':

When just a few inches tall, where did you come from,
With your long life of eternal spring?
The long winds whisper poems endlessly,
As they shiver your old dragon scales.1

Felix's 'old dragon scales' have been 'whispering poems' to us
for decades now. In the concert on 23 February, we pay homage to
those decades of work, and get to share in experiencing his
latest, most refined thoughts.